Leicester may need their smart KC again

As the financial regulations surrounding football become more complex and contentious, a first class lawyer is almost as important an asset for a football club as a good striker.

We should find out early next week if Leicester are going to be charged with breaching PSR for the 2023-24 season, the campaign that saw them return to the Premier League at the earliest opportunity.

Leicester have said nothing about their financial situation, a position they reiterated when contacted by The Athletic earlier this week. But the consensus view in the industry is that once you strip out all the “good” expenditure clubs are allowed to make on community programmes, youth development and so on, they lost about £95million for the rolling three-year period that ended on June 30, 2024.

According to the league’s understanding of its rulebook, clubs are assessed annually on the basis of their audited accounts, with the most recent season referred to as “T”, the season before “T-1” and the one before that “T-2”.

If you actually look at rule E.54, it says the loss threshold “shall be reduced by £22m for each season covered by T-1 and T-2 in which the club was in membership of the (English) Football League”. It does not say anything about a reduction for season T, which is when Leicester were in the EFL.

We do not need to imagine what Leicester lawyer Nick De Marco KC — whose radar for loopholes is legendary — might do with legalese as loose as this. If there is no EFL discount for T, it could be argued that Leicester’s threshold is the full £105million. Over to you, my learned friend.

And if that does not work, he could try A.1.247 in the “definitions and interpretation” section that says T means the club’s accounting period ending in the year in which the league’s assessment “takes place”, which sounds like T should be 2024-25 for Leicester.

That would knock the club’s loss threshold back to £83m — as T-1 would be last season’s Championship-winning campaign — but it would mean a return to the Upside Down world of 2022-23 when Leicester were being assessed on incomplete numbers. It would also mean that Nottingham Forest and Everton, twice, were prosecuted for the wrong seasons.

I must say I have great difficulty in making sense of all this, but if I was a Foxes fan I would feel a bit paranoid, but grateful that the club has a good lawyer.